


the primary ingredient of miracle-gro (and why you shouldn't feed a flytrap coffee)

by eyemoji, Kalgalen



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Post-Canon, Reverse Big Bang, kinda sappy for what usually comes out of me fight me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 20:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14723268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyemoji/pseuds/eyemoji, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalgalen/pseuds/Kalgalen
Summary: she knows it’s doug; it’s always doug when he’s considerate like this, but the last thing she wants right now is another weight to carry.as doug removes his other hand from the bench only to yelp at the liberal coating of white paint it’s gifted him, she can’t help but wonder when the punch line will hit.this fic was written for the 2018 wolf 359 reverse big bang





	the primary ingredient of miracle-gro (and why you shouldn't feed a flytrap coffee)

**Author's Note:**

> the art this piece was based off of was created by the wonderful @kalgalen (both here & on tumblr)  
> i apologize for the delay in getting this out, and hope that you enjoy the story:)

****

 

**i. seed**

 

it’s ~~minkowski~~ renee’s idea.

 

the crumbling cinderblock walls half boarded-over in an attempt at structural stability don’t spell out anything but _trouble_ to the members of her crew with enough memorial prescience to remember how hard and cruel murphy’s law likes to strike.

 

still, she insists, it will be good for them. give them something to focus on, so they don’t wander off into the unknown only to come back three weeks later with a splitting headache from too much silence and not enough tequila (lovelace.) so they don’t fidget through the entire gravitational-reacclimation process and rehousing process and whatever other processes they have to go through in order to reobtain a semblance of normalcy and then disappear for five days straight before turning up at 3am and waking her up with a bottle to her window (jacobi. when questioned, he swore up and down that he was aiming for ~~eiffel~~ doug’s window, not hers. she’s secretly relieved he got it wrong.)

 

flowers. vines. plants. life. she doesn’t bother wondering what could go wrong-- at this point, what _can’t_ they handle? _do your worst,_ she proclaims, bold yet still blustering in the face of a world that long decided to owe her no favors. lovelace gives her a Look. she resolves to be more private about these sorts of proclamations next time.

 

miranda stretches a hand out past the wrinkled _for sale_ sign, and ~~minkowski~~ renee tries not to flinch as her fingers cut through her line of vision and gently alight on one of the waxy leaves of a small plant that’s been hardy enough to outlast the decay and dilapidated it’s bathed in. as she rubs the leaf between her fingers, curious quirk to the tilt of her head, eyes whirring gently as they adjust to the light, ~~minkowski~~ renee lets out the breath she hadn’t even known she was holding.

 

from jacobi: “are you _sure_ about this?”

 

“absolutely.”

 

**ii. sprout**

 

it’s hard work, cleaning up the place, even after the fading trellises and chair-hangings have been either swapped out or scrapped, and the monthly installments for the next two years have been pre-paid with an advance from whatever little was left of her own credit and the promise of the goddard settlement to come. she tries not to think about what could happen if they don’t win the case. key words: she tries.

 

hera is officially ‘in goddard custody,’ but ~~minkowski~~ renee would have been damned if she was leaving a member of her crew, especially _that_ member of her crew, alone in the asylum that provided her with the loosest definition of ‘upbringing.’ no, hera stays with them, with _her,_ wired into the very tiny casing that’s embedded in the strap adjusted around her wrist. it’s small, yes, but _all_ of hera doesn’t need to be there, just enough to keep them all a little less on edge. she’s proud to say it’s the smartest watch she’s ever owned. (and will ever own, no matter how much jacobi conspires to buy her one of those iWatch things just to try and make her eat her words. _“but the watch itself isn’t smart,”_ he’ll argue, _“if i ripped it off your wrist, threw it on the ground, and jumped on it, nothing would happen.”_  she doesn’t like to think about the late colonel kepler, but she feels that even he would have been impressed with the creativity of the threat she’d promised jacobi after that.)

 

she turns to hera now, asks her, while pausing in her vigorous mopping seemingly to wipe the sweat off her brow, but whispering into her watch instead-- _what do you think?_

hera responds with what essentially boils down to “you do you,” commander, and ~~minkowski~~ renee scowls before the tinny yet noticeably unglitching voice adds, “but i think it’ll be good for him.”

 

she doesn’t need to ask which _him_ hera’s referring to, choosing instead to turn around and watch ~~eiffel~~ doug as he struggles with his own mop, chasing it halfway around the floor before swiping it under his own feet and tumbling to the ground. for a quarter of a second she’s worried, before he shakes some dust off and grins up at her from the ground.

 

“ _why_ did i think you would be any less clumsy on earth?” she groans under her breath, but he catches it and grins.

 

“i don’t know, but at least i have an excuse.”

 

he laughs. after a moment, renee joins in.

 

**iii. grow 1**

 

as the shop begins to properly take root, she finds herself spending more hours in it than she probably ought to be allowing herself. the goddard case looms closer and closer every day, and although there’s still a significant number of months to go, _months_ is still a lot less than _over a year_ . lovelace and jacobi have both found themselves increasingly in libraries and bars studying the bar, and hera spends half her days in conflict and negotiation with the interim goddard director of communications, a man called david clark, and the other half showing off for him as far as her patience, thin as it is and only really still intact because of the deal they’re converging towards, allows her. ~~minkowski~~ renee, on the other hand, seeks refuge in the warm air of the greenhouse, so different from the daily frigid threat that was life on a rotting spaceship seven point eight light years from earth, and there’s a part of her worming its way into her brain that tells her that every day, even as she stretches closer and closer to the light in a beautiful ongoing process of phototropism, away from cold, shaking hands and blood so unaffected by the mundanities of gravity that it floated in perfect little globules until it struck crimson against her cheek, she leaves behind the woman she had been so proud of, that she had worked so hard to be-- _minkowski. minkowski. minkow-_

 

“-ski,” the voice finishes, and she looks up from where her hands are shaking so hard she can’t even cut off the slim, decaying branch sagging broken in front of her chest the way hera had taught her she was supposed to to find the face of isabel lovelace, brighter than she’s seen it in a while, and the attached arm waving a nondescript file folder and two torn sheets of paper wildly in front of her.

 

“we got it,” she says, “we really think we got it.”

 

“wha?” is all renee can bring herself to say, and lovelace laughs. renee stares. this is new.

 

“look,” she says, thrusting the contents of her hands into renee’s startled arms. “ _really_ look.”

 

renee glances down and scans the top document, and there, in thick, bold letters, are the words “proceedings,” “legal,” and “Goddard Futuristics,” and even as lovelace doesn’t wait for her to finish before rolling ahead to explain the significance of whatever she and jacobi have found out, ~~minkowski~~ renee snaps back to herself, and all the previous dread rushes back to pool in the bottom of her stomach, counterweighing the automatic elation with which lovelace is filling her lungs.

 

“great,” is all she can manage to get out, and she knows lovelace’s face falls from her lack of expressed enthusiasm-- can see it in the way her jaw tightens and her eyes nearly squint and how she takes a half step back-- but she can’t bring herself to feel as if she cares. she _does_ care-- this she knows more than anything, that these people are her family, that no matter what they’ll always be her crew-- she _cares--_ but the overwhelming weight of gravity presses so hard upon her spine that she feels like she will be crushed if she tries to open her mouth to exhale another word. instead, she turns back inside to the shop proper, tosses the pruning shears on the counter where they land with a sharp, metallic bang, startling ~~eiffel~~ doug out of whatever he was working on with such intense concentration (flowers? one of the comic books lovelace had bought him? actually manning the cash register in the unlikely event of an actual customer entering their store and staying long enough to purchase something? she doesn’t know. she can’t bring herself to turn her head far enough to check.)

 

she slumps onto one of the now dust-free benches left over from the previous owner, hands gripping the edge, white-knuckled, as her shoulders heave a heavy sigh and her head falls as forward as her neck will allow. all of a sudden it’s too hot, and moving anything far enough to respond to doug’s sudden worried instances of “renee? renee? are you alright? renee, can you hear me? renee?” needs far more energy than she can muster. she hears him slip from his spot behind the counter and hurry towards her, and still, she doesn’t move a muscle. there’s a hand on her shoulder, tilting her back towards a normal sitting position, and she knows it’s doug; it’s always doug when he’s considerate like this, but the last thing she wants right now is another weight to carry.

 

she can’t make her mouth move to tell him this, so when he slides onto the bench beside her, she blames herself.

 

after a while, his questions fade away, and although she doesn’t know whether it’s because he’s stopped or because of her own dissociation from everything around her, they sit together in silence, he still holding her up by the shoulder, as if if he let her go she would slump into a jangled pile of fleshy jenga blocks, as if he let her go she’d be gone, and he’d be lost forever.

 

two lost souls on a hot bench. what a pretty pair.

as doug removes his other hand from the bench only to yelp at the liberal coating of white paint it’s gifted him, she can’t help but wonder when the punch line will hit.

 

**iv. grow 2**

 

doug has learned to whistle, and she can find nothing more infernal. there’s something more than tragic in the way he doesn’t know the words or even the names of half the tunes he goes through, but lovelace and jacobi seem to find the way he puckers his face hilarious, and honestly, if renee was feeling a little less murderous 24/7, she might too. hera, too, encourages it, mostly because she has less and less time each day to check in with ~~minkowski~~ renee  & co, even with all her multitasking processing power, and renee finds herself yearning for the day hera will be back to fill the rooms of the shop in all her omniscient, omnipresent glory. while she waits, she spends an entire afternoon hanging a model hephaestus and wolf 359 from the ceiling, as if bringing the space back inside makes it all simultaneously more real and as if none of it had ever happened at all.

 

 ~~minkowski~~ renee avoids thinking about miranda, as if the less she fixates on her, the more she can convince herself they’re all just living in her happier alternate universe where the only ‘hephaestus mission’ is to grow a proper hydrangea. (jacobi spouts some trivia about acidity and pH and flower color, but renee would be happy if the damn thing would just _grow_.) still, there’s no avoiding forever the fact that she exists and, more importantly, lives with them and has done so for the past several months while they all came up with hundreds of places to send her and thousands more reasons not to. their indecisiveness gave way to what none of them will admit just might be a little fondness-- because as long as no one looks her in her cybernetic eyes or doesn’t pretend not to hear their little whirrs as they adjust to the light of the great outdoors, or have her and hera in a room together, it’s almost easy to forget who she is and what she’s done to them-- after all, the times that she’d hurt them the most, she had been wearing their own faces. _besides,_ ~~minkowski~~ renee reminds herself, _she makes a mean black coffee._

 

disregarding the irrefutable truth of this statement, there’s another reason why they can’t just let the former doctor miranda pryce wander off into the sunset like a six year old on steroids: she’s the one refitting both the house they don’t actually own quite yet and the combination greenhouse-plant store that they _do_ (“great use of resources, _renee_ ”/ “shut up, jacobi,”) to serve as chassis for hera. she’s _useful_ , if not anything else, and even as ~~minkowski~~ renee rubs her shoulder, wincing with the too-soon, always too-soon memories of a shaking hand and a soundless voice and an airlock she can see her breath inside, she’s already worrying that she’ll start to care, that they’ll adopt not-pryce into their little broken family and that she’ll never be able to outrun the nightmares, not when she shows up at the breakfast table at six in the morning and tries to eat wheaties dunked in orange juice.

 

it’s this kind of thing she comes to the shop to escape. there’s a little red radio in the corner behind the cash register playing light music, and the curtain behind doug, who’s perched at the counter with a comic book, waves lightly in the breeze filtering in with sunshine through the open windows. the venus flytrap on the other side of the register (in memory of the plant monster, or possibly dr hilbert; maybe both, she doesn’t want to think about it too hard) closes lazily around some bug or the other as the sole untaped corner of the only nasa travel poster any of them would agree to buy flaps in angry protest at having come undone. everything is peaceful. everything is perfect. everything is so-- _renee._

 

the wood squeaks under her feet as she tends to the hibiscus, a job she trusts herself with because there’s nothing to drop, no gravity to worry about besides her own, not that there isn’t enough of that to parcel up and go around. it isn’t always as bad as it was that one time on the wet bench, but getting through the days, even one at a time, is too difficult to articulate when her nights are spent wide awake on high alert and her days on just barely this side of lucid. not even jacobi, who’d caught her once at such an early hour, mentions anything to her-- perhaps he genuinely doesn’t notice, perhaps he doesn’t want to broach the subject. maybe it all just hits a little too close to home. but although renee knows that _of course_ there’s fallout from what they went through, _of course_ they’re all going to have to deal with new, more personal problems and roadblocks, it’s more than easy for ~~minkowski~~ to consistently whisper in her ear to _turn around, look this way; it’s all over now? it’ll never be over; wouldn’t it be easier to just stop;_ that she’s alone, _you’re alone--_ and she blinks back tears in front of the hibiscus’ lone red bloom, hoping doug isn’t paying enough attention to her to worry, hoping that he’ll come over and wrap her in a hug anyways. everything is cold, so cold, even in the weighted heat of summer.

 

an unexpected touch to her arm draws her out of her spiralling thoughts; she jumps-- the hand can’t belong to doug; she’d have heard him come up behind her. she gives a little half-turn to see: miranda. the curtain behind the counter waves where she’d come out from it as if either in encouragement or a saucy taunt for the both of them from its spot safe behind the counter.

 

it’s been a long time since she last broke a pot due to forgetting the concept of gravity-- weeks, maybe more, but it’s just as well she isn’t holding one now because she springs back from the plant in alarm, ripping her arm away from miranda, fully conscious of the surprise on both of their faces. she _knows_ that miranda isn’t the doctor pryce she knew; that’s not what this is about. no, if anything she’s worried about getting too attached, too attached to all these people around her who hover just slightly out of reach in the zone of we-care-but-we-don’t-know-what-to-do, so worried they’ll no longer need her, so worried she’ll be left behind. she has never told them this-- how could she? they all left one firefight for another, and the growing number of hours per day she spends in the peace and quiet of the flower shop isn’t enough to counteract the constant reminders that there’s a war going on out there in the real world, a war of wit and words, and one she feels like she’s the most useless contributor for. her moment in the spotlight was months ago on a derelict space station, moments before everything fell apart and she couldn’t save any of them, not really, not in the end, and--

 

“renee?”

 

her voice is soft, gentle, nothing like that of the woman who’d threatened to wreck doug’s mind and in doing so, her own, nothing like the voice of an author of a manual such as _Pryce & Carter’s _ ought to be, in ~~minkowski~~ renee’s opinion, and maybe that’s another reason why it’s so easy for her own mind to accept miranda over pryce than it is to try and institute renee over ~~minkowski~~.  

 

still, “yes, miranda?” she forces out, as if nothing is wrong, as if if she puts enough force into the words, they’ll become true.

 

“y-you- you look up-upset. can i- is there any- c-can i help?”  

 

the heat she cannot feel shines brightly in miranda’s gaze, and for a moment renee is lost for words.

 

“no,” she snaps, a bit harsher than she means to, “at least-- i don’t think so?”

 

the unsteadiness of her voice betrays her. miranda just continues to stare down at her with those strange, strange eyes, unblinking because she doesn’t have to. renee makes a snap decision.

 

“let’s get a drink. coffee,” she clarifies, before raising her chin and calling to doug. the way he scrambles out from behind the counter at the promise of caffeine almost brings a smile to her lips.

 

**v. bud**

 

for years to come she’ll curse herself for forgetting the name of the coffeeshop they went to that afternoon, before the goddard settlement came and they all moved somewhere better, before she (and lovelace) finally was able to kick herself in the ass hard and for long enough to spill everything (or, _most_ everything) to first dominik and then a therapist, before they all finally settled down to their own versions of _content_ , a foreign term for any of them.

in the moment, however, she doesn’t know that the faded walls with peeling paper will someday become more important to her than she ever could have predicted, doesn’t think she’ll miss the not-bitter-enough-to-be-black, not-sweet-enough-to-be-a-guilty-pleasure coffee that leaves rings on the wooden table no matter how many napkins she stuffs under the bottom. all she knows is that there’s a strange solidarity between the three of them-- doug, miranda, renee (and the venus flytrap, if you count it-- doug had brought it along for whatever reason and she’s not complaining--) that extends to the fluidity of the motion as miranda tries to feed the flytrap a piece of coffee cake while doug shifts the plant a couple inches to the right in protest.

 

this half-reversed dynamic is more than a bit strange, sure, but she finds herself laughing and ordering them all another round (not chai, never chai,) and if out of the corner of her eye and through vaguely dirty windows she can catch sight of two familiar figures walking up the path to the coffeeshop, she’s not complaining. for just a moment everything seems sparkling and shiny-new, and it hasn’t fixed it all-- hasn’t fixed anything-- but slowly she’s being reminded of all the breaths of fresh air she’s been skipping out on. all of a sudden the words start pouring out of her mouth and she trips over herself in her haste to spread it all out on the table for the two of them to take in.

 

she tells them about small things, inconsequential things, about life back in poland, the chicken she’d once raised for two weeks, nights spent out in the yard with her father picking out the constellations (if it were dark right now she could show them both leo, point out the stretch of sky that had tortured them for so many years,) about college, the air force, dominik.

 

they listen, eyes wide, and renee suspects doug knows that eiffel hadn’t known any of this, that she’d never felt to share with him then the way she is now. he meets her eyes as the door to the store jingles open and jacobi and lovelace, two sights for sore eyes make their way over to their booth.

 

she smiles.

 

he smiles back.

 

miranda smiles too, not with them, but knowingly.

 

lovelace smacks a hefty file folder down onto the table with a _slap!_ that makes them all jump, even jacobi, who proceeds to look sheepish and snark some quip or the other as he slides himself and two hefty textbooks next to doug. they all laugh. lovelace is beaming. minkowski holds up a hand to stop her in her tracks before she can get too carried away in explanation, tapping her herawatch instead and holding it up to her ear. jacobi rolls his eyes, reaches across the table and shunts the device to a kind of speakerphone, and everyone breathes a sigh of contentment as hera’s voice rushes out of the scratchy speakers and into their little bubble of a booth.

 

“you won’t _believe_ what he’s trying to get me to agree to,” she launches into directly, and they all roll their eyes as she goes off on her most recent tirade, all secretly in agreement, but willing to play along with jacobi’s “ _au constance contraire,_ hera,” to keep up their lively spirits.

 

minkowski, possibly for the first time since they all took their physical leave of goddard futuristics, feels at home in her element, unconflicted and unconfused and free, no matter how temporarily, of the world she carries upon her shoulders.

 

gazing around the table, at the laughing set of halfjack screwballs who just happen to be more than slightly competent-- at _her_ laughing set of halfjack screwballs who just happen to be exactly as competent as she needs them to be, it’s easier to remember that:

 

 **vi. flower**                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

she is renee, renee minkowski, goddamnit.

and a winter may have came and went,

but she’s ready to once again bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, you can find me @justasmalltownai on tumblr  
> i am currently taking commissions.


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